Pen Name in Dystopia

Standard

I’m get­ting more and more excit­ed by the day as I approach the end of the first act of Bilqis, the first book of the Hin­ter­land Chron­i­cles. Upon com­ple­tion of the first act, I plan to go back, fill in any miss­ing his­to­ry, repair plot holes and clean up any major lan­guage issues. I am final­ly able to see some progress in this sto­ry that has been with me for years.

I am already think­ing ahead to the release, which I don’t expect will be until some time next year, although I am push­ing for Decem­ber. I already have one will­ing beta read­er in the wings and well… this type of progress after so long feels real­ly good.

I start­ed think­ing though about the idea of a pen name. My first nov­el, An Unpro­duc­tive Woman, is list­ed as con­tem­po­rary, women’s lit, or gen­er­al fic­tion. Bilqis will be some­thing alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent though. We’re talk­ing near future, dystopi­an, SF.

Big dif­fer­ence, yeah?

I recent­ly read an arti­cle that high­ly pro­mot­ed the idea of using a pen name when writ­ing works in dif­fer­ing gen­res so as not to con­fuse or dis­ap­point read­ers. This makes a lot of sense to me because the peo­ple who loved AUW, will like­ly return to me look­ing for some­thing sim­i­lar and if so, they would be ter­ri­bly dis­ap­point­ed. My inter­ests don’t lie in the realm any­more. That said, I don’t want to write under a pen name. I sim­ply do not.

What do you think?

Then I start­ed to con­sid­er that per­haps I could used a pen name that was mere­ly a dif­fer­ent form of my cur­rent name. Khaal­i­dah Muham­mad-Ali could become K. M-Ali.

Post navigation

These days it’s all mar­ket­ing and brand­ing think of tim Bur­ton and what he is known for or Stephen King what he what he does they are spe­cif­ic in their gen­res but as an artist you have the right
to explore dif­fer­ent worlds